to advocate for the death of 8 billion people is a hell of a stance. there's pro genocide and then there's... I guess this is just hating the whole species.
to advocate for the death of 8 billion people is a hell of a stance. there's pro genocide and then there's... I guess this is just hating the whole species.
I think she advocating for fewer births. The 8 billion deaths would eventually happen by themselves, most of them of old age.
She’s not doing either. In that same conversation, she goes on to talk about how we don’t live in that world and can’t return there, and what the implications should be for policy.
The thing is that if you depopulate by reducing the birth rate, you end up in a situation where you have a whole lot of old people and very few young people, which cannot be sustained.
It doesn't need to be sustained, the whole point is that eventually when the next generation ages up, the number of old people won't be as high.
However, in the intermediate stage, you are desperately short of working-age people to help support the massive aging population.
This isn't a theoretical - most of Western Europe has been in this boat for a long time, and relies heavily on immigration to fill the labour gap (despite however much political posturing about wanting to restrict immigration)
If we do this on a global scale, there is nowhere to draw immigrants from, and a bunch of old folks are going to be abandoned to die...
What's the alternative though? Creating new humans purely to be able to have them work and pay for stuff for other existing humans? That doesn't seem a bit dystopian for you?
The problem I have with this logic is that it seems to assume a binary of the population either staying at least as high as it is or massively reducing. The idea that there's no middle ground where the population goes down slowly rather than massively spiking all at once feels like it needs much more justification rather than just assuming it.
Oh, for sure, that alternative is not great either. We've built a society on the myth that infinite growth is possible, and at some point the chickens are coming home to roost...
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Humans are humans, at the end of the day. Especially as someone who grew up at the height of EU open borders, I'm not real bothered which side of an imaginary line on a map someone happened to be born on
If you don't want Europe to look like Sudan or India, you might want to start caring about those "imaginary lines" that your ancestors until very recently held in such high regard that they would fight and die to defend or advance them.
If Europeans are replaced by foreigners, there is no Europe any more.
If the only argument behind why Europe should exist is that you don't like people who look like the people from Sudan or India, then maybe it shouldn't.
(If you instead want to claim that you're not trying to talk about ethnicity and are instead talking about economies or whatever, consider whether the ancestors you mention drawing those imaginary lines over places like Sudan and India were motivated by their desire to colonize and extract wealth from them at the expense of the local populations, and whether that's more responsible for the economic differences between them and Europe than the lines themselves)
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From what I can tell, all of the hate against minorities is coming from you, not anyone else
Europe is built on foreign things. What would life in England be like without Tea, Coffee and Curry?
I for one do not welcome an exclusionist Europe
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You're the only one obviously full of hate in these comments
europe to here with the ethnicism!
I can see why it might be undesirable socially but why not, economically? That's what technology is for.
In order to achieve this, though, we desperately need to get every country well below replacement-level fertility rate, and sustain that for a long, long time. Not sure it's possible, particularly when some political factions still consider "below replacement" to be a bad thing.
It's happening though. Birthrate in many countries are below replacement rate, and birthrates in all countries have declined:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2025/09/11/hu....
here's an AP news fact check article from 2022 if anyone is curious about what Goodall actually said: https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-jane-goodall-populatio...
to straw-man what someone says and then get indignant is a waste of your emotional budget
And that's a charitable evaluation.